Contributor daigorocub

This has happened to me many times, and just today it came to bite a friend of mine who was earnestly giving a try to Ubuntu...and renounced after losing his graphical interface except for bulletx. The problem is simple: sometimes kernel updates are released hours or even days before the restricted drivers packages are updated too (read: recompiled and packaged for new kernel). As a result, obviously, when the system is restarted the graphical driver does not function anymore.
And I am sure that it can happen also with other drivers.

The solution? One of two; either:

the kernel packages are completely held back until ANY AND ALL restricted drivers packages are updated (which is already done in Hardy, to be honest, considering that so far I have done three or four kernel updates and alwyas I saw in contemporary a new, repckaged nvidia-glx-new), or:

the update-manager program should check if any restricted drivers are installed, check if they are up-to-date with the kernel update, and in case they are not, blacklist the kernel updates until such a time when updating is secure.

I think this feature is quite a must; most users in the future are not even going to check what they are going to update at all; and it is sure to turn many people off Ubuntu if they suddenly find their boxes without graphical, or network (potentially even worse considering we have bulletproof X!) support.

Replace initscripts with upstart events. Our boot sequence is currently slow, full of race conditions and poor interactions, especially with competition between the series of tasks run by sysv-rc, udev and sometimes just with the kernel. We developed upstart so that we could have a truly event driven boot sequence that would be fast, reliable and flexible; we should take advantage of it.

A separate partition for /home has been proposed for a long time in the forums. It implies some risks, though, so based on disk size Ubiquity should estimate the amount of space that should be left for / or whether a separate partition should be made at all. Then...

-The first time an user installs Ubuntu, he is given the option to set a separate /home. This option is selected by default, with a size for each partition based on a sane guess:

http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/7958/firstinstallaro2.png

-Of course, he can just choose not to set a separate /home. This option will be selected by default if the results of the system test suggest that's the best thing to do.

http://img186.imageshack.us/img186/6498/firstinstallbfs6.png

-Manual install is also possible. Selecting it greys out everything related to separate /home, since it's implied that the user doesn't want to be guided.

http://img177.imageshack.us/img177/7976/firstinstallcvc2.png

-If the user set a separate /home, the next time he installs Ubuntu a new option appears and is selected by default, prompting to use the existing /home partition. All other options are still available, though.

http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/9034/secondinstalliq1.png

[....]

I've wasted many hours of my life clicking "Skip" more than 15.000 times while doing full backups of my home-directory.

Nautilus simply HAS TO offer more buttons than "Skip", "Abort" and "Retry". A simple "Skip All" in the fashion of "Overwrite All" would have saved my hands, arms and mousebuttons severe strain!

Secondly, a "Skip this folder" should also be introduced. For example, Nautilus could offer this functionality after 3 files of the same folder could not be copied successfully (Just an idea).

These functions are really easy to implement & they would help so much! Please fix this!

P.S.: Alternatively, make Nautilus simply copy everything without trouble. I really do not understand why it always complains over 15.000 times when copying my home-directory... even when I'm root. This is bad. But offering Skip-functionality might be the easier choice!

This is concerning the graphical and the text based installer.

It`s a bad habit introduces by microsoft. Do not ask questions in the middle of the installation after you did already started to copy things.

(1) The user starts the installation.
(2) He is asked if he wants to install.
(3) Make as many hardware tests as you need.
(4) Now ask all needed questions.
(5) Install Ubuntu in one run. Tell the user he can no go away for perhaps X minutes.

Otherwise it`s annoying. Input answer, wait a bit, input answer, wait again over and over again. You can improve this!

Some system, it has not a usb boot from bios.
Add in grub a function to boot usb drive to resolve this problem

The calender applet in the gnome panel should support sunbird and other calendars.

It will be nice if we could have an easier way to do a recursive change of permissions to a folder and everything inside (all sub folders and files)

The option to "Apply permissions to enclosed files" does not always works as expected. this option should apply recursively the permissions displayed in the window to all files and sub folders for both owner/group name changes and permissions associated to them.

Of course the user should be able to do so only if have access to all the files within the folder.

If you liked this idea, check out my other ideas.

Make it easier to install ubuntu over a LAN

I'd love to see Ubuntu work on a ubuntu server which can automatically set itself up, and install ubuntu on 10000 computers automatically, so easily anyone can do it. It would consist of 1 CD, Ubuntu Self-Deploy Network Server.

It should be as simple as:
1) pop CD into server
2) Fill in network name, admin password, if computers should be given 1 static IP per mac address or make it dynamic, network settings, approximately how big the network will grow to, and what services should be run (ie, mail server, internal DNS server). The server should also be capable of setting itself up as a router
3) Latest version of Ubuntu server is automatically downloaded and installed.
4) Server is automatically configured using settings filled in.
5) Apt repository proxy is set up automatically on server (for temporary use). Latest packages for ubuntu are downloaded and stored in the Apt proxy cache.
6) A Netboot server is started which will automatically install Ubuntu on all computers using settings set during config.
7) Turn on all computers and boot from lan. Ubuntu is automatically downloaded and installed on all the computers (regardless of how many).
8) Clients are configured to use the servers settings (Maybe over LDAP?)
9) Finally, when all clients are done, set all the clients to restart in 3 or 4 mins time, and restart the server instantly.

`ala network in a box.

If admin chose for each computer to use their own local users, ask for them on every computer. If its centralised, the server should ask for the usernames on reboot. Server should have a way to easily manage all clients too.

Having this would make configuring even massive Ubuntu networks easy. Nobody should need to spend $1000 on an admin to set up a network, and take 2 weeks doing it. If we can let admins set up massive networks only requiring to pay them for 3 hours for testing (ie, set up server, and come back when it is all installed), it means that businesses can be up and running within a day, and cheaply, and may not need a professional administrator in many cases.

[....]

This may seem very special, but a lot of small companies (1 to 10 employees) would love to run linux because of the cost (a Win workstation has easily 500 to 1000 Euro of software on it - each and everyone of it).

The one thing that NOBODY gets done: installing an ERP/CRM. Be it Compiere, SQL-Ledger, Post-Books, TinyERP, LX-Office - you name it and I show you a million threads in all the ubuntu-forums "can't install/can't run XYZ after installation"

Most small business just want in, stock, out, furnisher, client, offer, invoice - pretty basic stuff that EVERY ERP can handle.

How about getting one of those into the repositories as an "easy to install" or "no brainer" package? I'd LOVE it - and reading the frums in German, French and English, there are literally several thousand users that would love it, too.

When someone wants to unmount a volume and the mount point is used, he gets a message telling him that the volume can't be unmounted because an application uses it. The user has no idea which application is actually using it and can't remove the device.

I propose that the popup tells him which application(s) is(are) using the device and propose to terminate them (that list should be kept up to date when the app. dies).

At the moment it's possible to manage traditional wired and WiFi connections using Network Manager. To connect via a modem, a 3G/GPRS card, over bluetooth to a cell phone or via USB to another device requires that the user installs extra packages, and does a fair amount of configuration that isn't found in Network Manager.

A single unified tool should be provided which allows the user to connect to a network (or internet) via any supported method. It would also be useful to provide an extension to this tool to manage firewall rules and network connection sharing.

Some computers make alot of noise whith their fans to keep them cool. Almost every computer has temperature and fan speed sensors.

The idea is to control the cpu scaling factor or the amount of cpu time in order to make it cool enough so that the fans don't speed up and there is no fan noise.

There is already a priority mode to preserve the battery charge. Why not another mode to preserve silence?

It would be nice to drop a file on a icon of a folder that is on gnome panel, like when you drop a file on the trash icon.

Also, one could be able to drop text on the text-editor window task on the gnome panel and append it to the text that already exists.

The bottom line is to improve the drag and drop thing with the area of the screen that is allways available: the gnome panels and the icons in them.

It's complicated to reach folders connected through that. I use that feature to use my FTP/sf.net accounts as a common nautilus folder, but the problem is that it ends up as being nautilus-only!.

I can't reach the folder through command line, nor any other program (regexxer for example), or put it as bookmark on my places bar... nothing.

I'd suggest to make SYMLINKS instead to random folders put in /media or something, so they could be reached by other powerful tools, so they're not locked to Nautilus only. Or any other implementation... just make it accessable!!

Title should read: Optimize gnome panel for VERTICAL usage

For those of us with wide screen monitors, it would be great if we could have a panel that works well in the vertical position. We have additional space for a wide vertical panel on the right or left side of our monitor.

There are several bugs/problems when using the panel vertically.

1. Window List is broken and unusable when used vertically. The text stays horizontal without wrapping, making it completely unreadable. In my opinion, the text should just stay vertical like the "Menu Bar" and clock. There is also an odd expansion problem. Vertically the Window List is set to fixed size and won't expand to fit the free space of the panel. See:

2. When aligned on the left, the submenu arrows point the wrong way when navigating menus.

3. Notification Area icons don't scale. Either the notification icons should scale properly to the size of the panel, or they should re-align into a grid. This is true for both vertical and horizontal panel use. Launchers should be able to be set in a grid as well.

Remember back in the day on Windows 3.1 how you could, at the click of a button, have all open windows the same size on the screen? Why did they drop that? Everyone has at one point had two windows open that they wanted to see at the same time and had to carefully drag them to the appropriate size to see both. I don't see this as a high priority but it would be cool if there were some "auto arrange" options for existing frames that could be accessed with the right-click menu. It would save a lot of time.

The nautilus tree side panel is currently no more then a directory selector. It is possible to drag files on to directory items in the tree side panel (F9) but that's it. I propose changes to integrate this panel more into the file management experience.

I would also like to have the possibility to drag directories from this tree into another directory within the tree or main list. Also I would like to see the ability to change the directory name by selecting the directory in the tree and press F2 (currently this will change the name of the last selected file/directory from the main view). In the same manner selecting the directory from the tree view and doing copy-paste actions (with keys of context menu) would be required.

Most of the planet uses the Metric System. So why does the system default to imperial units? Make A4 the default paper size for printing, only two countries don't use it. Most people don't know what inches are so cm or mm should be the default.